To Carry the Synthesis a Little Further

Abstract

In a captivating essay, Eliott Aronson manages not only to pay homage to social psychology's glorious past but also to raise fundamental issues on the relation between our past and present, with inescapable implications for our future. Nobody seems to have systematic data on this, but many seem to feel that as a discipline we are curiously ahistorical. That is, our collective memory is typically brief, and we may abandon a problem not because a satisfactory resolution has been reached but because the topic is no longer in vogue, for one sociological reason or another. The case of dissonance theory, cited by Aronson, is indeed striking. Much current research in motivated social cognition seems highly relevant to dissonance research (and other cognitive-consistency research) conducted in the 1960s. Yet, the connections seem to be hardly taken seriously by contemporary investigators, and the early research, if cited at all, is treated in a perfunctory way rather than as a highly relevant (and painstakingly gathered) knowledge base that any new work on the same general issues had better reckon with. Admittedly, the dissonance research-tradition itself seems to have partially contributed to this state of affairs. The definition of dissonance has repeatedly changed over the years. The currently prevalent notion seems to be Cooper and Fazio's (1984), in which dissonance follows from the perception of personal responsibility for aversive consequences. If that is what genuine dissonance consists of, it is understandable why work that under broader framing would have been considered as dissonance related is now classified as outside the dissonance pale. Aronson agrees with Berkowitz and Devine (1989) that the developments in dissonance research could be part and parcel of a general preference in social psychology for analysis over To me, such a tendency reflects more than a mere fascination with distinctions and an indifference to similarities. It may also reflect the tendency to set our conceptual sights on relatively low-level, operational variables that appear to work, as opposed to seeking out the most general principles capable of explaining our phenomena. The apparent aversion in social psychology to abstractions and generalities could be counterproductive. First, a fundamental objective of science is the search for general principles. The very name of the game is abstraction from instances-a strategy designed to explain a maximal number of cases by a minimal number of propositions. A professional norm that constrains our quest for generalities simply reduces our potency as a science. On a different tack, focusing predominantly on low-level constructs could create a situation in which a tremendous amount of effort, talent, and creativity goes to waste. This would happen if new generations of researchers ignored previous relevant work and, hence, ended up rediscovering the wheel. Thus, I strongly endorse Aronson's plea for a synthesis. In fact, I believe that the synthesis he is proposing could be carried even further. In the remainder of my commentary, I attempt to demonstrate how. The Trouble With Dissonance